Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Even when you’re surrounded by people who have fully bought in to the “lean” philosophy, it’s easy to fall into bad habits and start overbuilding things.

Lately we’ve set ourselves the following challenge: any task that will take more than a day to implement needs to have a written spec and estimates of how long it will take to complete.  Now, no one likes writing specs (our user stories are pretty spare and get fleshed out through comments in Basecamp) and we like doing estimates even less.  So we’re particularly motivated to look again at longer tasks and figure out how to do some version of them in less than a day.

(Devotees of GTD will recognize this as a variation on the ‘if you can complete a task in 2 minutes, just do it’ concept.)

Obviously, not all tasks fit into this mindset, but I’ve been pretty amazed by the amount of really useful one-day-or-less tasks we’ve been able to negotiate on, implement, and release.

I wanted to redesign our KISSinsights results page to incorporate pagination, “new responses since last login”, search, and filtering.  This would’ve required at least a couple days (and since it required multiple people collaborating, more than that in elapsed time).

Instead, we released search within results.

And then the ability to filter responses by people who chose a specific answer option.

The results page is now at least 25% more useful than it was 2 days ago, and no one had to write a spec or wait around for someone to free up.

It’s not just an engineering thing, either – I get these grand ideas and get all excited and write myself a task.  A few weeks ago, I created myself a task to create a series of marketing emails for my product to be sent out at weekly intervals.   It has been sitting there.  Why? Because it’s not a 1-day project – it’s a ‘wait until I have some quiet time to concentrate and do a bunch of writing, and then format all those emails’ project.   And we all know how often that happens.

So today I’m deleting that task.  I’m going to write one marketing email today.  Maybe I will write more later, but I will get one done today and cross it off and get it implemented.

What’s the biggest thing bugging you? I challenge you to find something you can do to make it better that you can complete today.  It may only be a tiny thing, but it will be better and more importantly it will be done.

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